Duke Jordan: 1922 - 2006

Pianist helped build bebop

Working with saxophonist Charlie Parker, Duke Jordan created masterpieces in a genre that became a cornerstone of jazz

August 13, 2006|By New York Times News Service

Duke Jordan, a pianist whose work with saxophonist Charlie Parker endures in the jazz canon, died Tuesday in Valby, Denmark, a suburb of Copenhagen. He was 84 and had lived in self-imposed exile from the United States since 1978.

His death was confirmed by Alistair Thomson, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Denmark.

Mr. Jordan was regarded as one of the great early bebop pianists. The sound he helped create in the postwar era was something new in the American landscape, and it remains a cornerstone of jazz.

His work with Parker, recorded for the Dial and Savoy labels, soared with a lilting intensity. It was hard-driving and lyrical, heady and heartfelt, said Ira Gitler, a jazz critic who heard Mr. Jordan and Parker in 1947 at the Onyx Club and the Three Deuces, two long-vanished nightclubs on West 52nd Street in Manhattan.

A handful of recordings from 1947 and 1948 featuring Parker, along with Miles Davis on trumpet, Mr. Jordan on piano and Max Roach on drums, are considered masterpieces. They include "Embraceable You," "Crazeology," and "Scrapple From the Apple."

Mr. Jordan's "beautifully apt introductions," in the words of Phil Schaap, curator of Jazz at Lincoln Center, lasted only seconds. But they set the stage for three-minute explosions of creativity.

Bebop--its nonsense name often credited to trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie--was nothing like the orchestral jazz of the 1930s, made for ballroom dancing. It was fast, furious, intricate and improvised.

Musicians took the basic structures of the blues or standards like "I Got Rhythm" and turned them inside out, embellishing their chords with cascades of notes. In Mr. Jordan's hands, the piano became a fountain of melody and color.

In 1949 and the early 1950s, Mr. Jordan recorded with groups led by the saxophonists Coleman Hawkins, Stan Getz and Sonny Stitt, led his own quartet and performed at New York nightclubs and on national radio broadcasts.

Classically trained, he had a gift for composing and teaching, and several of his works, including "Jor-du" and "No Problem," remain jazz classics, Schaap said.

Some of his compositions also are heard on the soundtrack of the 1959 version of "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," directed by Roger Vadim and starring Jeanne Moreau.

Irving Sidney Jordan was born in New York at the dawn of the era of recorded jazz, on April 1, 1922. Before his 21st birthday he was playing piano in big bands, including the Savoy Sultans, the house orchestra at the Savoy Ballroom, in its day the world's most famous dance hall.

In 1952, Mr. Jordan married jazz singer Sheila Jordan, who often said she loved Charlie Parker so much she married his piano player. Their interracial marriage was unusual in the 1950s, when segregation remained legal and miscegenation was a crime in some states. The marriage did not last.

Sheila Jordan became a highly regarded performer. They had a daughter, Traci, who became a music promoter.

Mr. Jordan, like many of his contemporaries, developed a heroin habit, Gitler said. By the mid-1960s, he was reduced to driving a taxicab in New York. He rehabilitated himself in the 1970s and began a new life as a leader of trios and quartets in Copenhagen, where he settled in 1978. He recorded more than 30 albums for the Danish label SteepleChase and performed in concerts and at jazz festivals.

"He never changed styles," said jazz historian Scott Yanow. "He had been one of the very first pianists to pick up on the changes that bebop brought, breaking out of conventional song, which took jazz beyond dance music into something new."